Denmark tops European tech table, two other Scandis right behind The European Commission has published its league table of digital countries and the Best of Europe’s tech world is, you guessed it, Denmark! Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland make up the remaining top four, proving that Scandis really do do IT better. But in a not-too-shabby performance, the UK is jostling for attention at …
Neither the Netherlands nor Finland are Scandinavian countries. The Scandinavian countries are Denmark, Norway and Sweden, all of which are also Nordic, as is Finland. The Netherlands is neither Scandinavian nor Nordic. This is all basic stuff which has been out there for a long time yet news sites keep making the same damned mistake.
Disclaimer: I have no Scandinavian or Nordic connections.
Also, since the statistics are gathered by the European Commission, there is no data for Norway (or any other non-EU country).
I -think- this is the press release which this article is about, if any body wants to dive deeper into the charts:
http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_IP-15-4475_en.htm
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The article didn't claim the Netherlands is Scandinavian. Read it again - Denmark tops table, TWO other Scandis right behind. Those two being Sweden and Finland, with the Netherlands being mentioned simply as falling between those two.
As for Finland, whether it counts as part of Scandinavia or not is not all clearly defined, since Scandinavia itself is a relatively recent term that has never actually applied to a clearly defined entity and varies a lot depending on whether it's defined by ethnic groups, language, culture, political boundaries and relations, simple geography, or other factors. Iceland and the Faroe Isles are also sometimes included as part of Scandinavia. Restricting it to just Sweden, Norway and Denmark is certainly the most common usage, but it can't be claimed to be strictly wrong to include others. In particular, note that Finland lies on the Scandinavian peninsular while Denmark does not, and that it was mostly part of Sweden or the Swedish empire for a large part of the last millennium.
Scandinavia comprises the countries of the Scandinavian Peninsula. Historically, that included Denmark as one-time possessors of Skåne (roughly "skaw-neh") in Southern Sweden, the region after which the peninsula is named. That little "å" in the name Skåne is a good signifier: if your language uses it, you're Scandinavian; if not, you're not.
(Wikipedia tells me that by this rule, Bavaria is in Scandinavia, which goes to show you shouldn't try to reduce things down to single rules ;) )
Based only on the views of people I've met, the Finns do not consider themselves to be Scandinavian, although the large minority of ethnic Swedes in the country may differ in that view. Icelanders consider themselves of "Scandinavian descent" rather than being Scandinavian per se. I've never met anyone from the Faroe Islands to ask them.
I didn't say or even imply that the article claimed the Netherlands is part of Scandinavia. Read my post again. The article asserted that two of Sweden, the Netherlands and Finland are Scandinavian. That assertion is incorrect as only Sweden is part of Scandinavia. As for Finland, whether it counts as part of Scandinavia or not IS very clearly defined as I believe a later poster has elaborated.
Finland was a part of Sweden for more than 600 years and there are some 5000 words from Swedish in the Finnish language. If you look at the culture, then Finland is no doubt Scandinavian and the closest country to Finland in that respect is Sweden. Finnish law was written in Swedish first and then translated (as it is based on Swedish law) until I think about 1950.
Finns decided to go with Finnish design and not Scandinavian design. If you look at the word Scandinavia with is the name of the mountain range between Norway and Sweden then only those two should be called Scandinavian. To make everybody, especially the Swedes happy, we talk about the Nordic countries. If you see it written without the "the" then a Finn is to blame.
Also Iceland fits in as it should, of course. Also Sweden and Finland as part of Sweden plus Norway and Denmark where once ruled by the same Queen. And if you wonder why the Nobel Peace Prize is handed out in Norway the reason is that Norway was then a part of Sweden.
As for knowing their history the Swedes are more lousy than the rest. Perhaps because they don't want to remember how a big country ended. And one should not forget Estonia once a part of both Denmark and Sweden.
When Swedes fuck up abroad they tent to claim they are Finnish and when I do something silly I might suddenly become Swedish.
The nice passenger ships between Stockholm and Helsinki are called the Finland ships in Sweden while the Finns call them the Sweden ships.
When a member of the Nordic countries meet an other member far far away they feel like meeting a next door neighbour and that is not surprising.
Cheers to all of you.
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It seems to me that the survey was looking at how "like us" other countries are. Not everyone wants to do everything online and nor is that always the best way to do things.
A lot of people won't use the cloud, for example, because they feel it's a bad idea. That doesn't make them "digitally' backwards, probably in fact the opposite.
A lot of governments have wasted a lot of money putting things online so perhaps those governments who didn't were more far sighted........
I'm not saying that all the factors they looked at are pointless but just that it shouldn't all be taken at face value.
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